Conventional data communication techniques, such as those employed when communicating in an ethernet environment, can be configured to transmit data frames such as frame 101 shown in FIG. 1. Frame 101 contains header 103, data section 105 and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) section 107. Cyclic redundancy check section 107 is an example of an error detection or correction trailer which is part of frame 101 and is used by a receiving device to determine if frame 101 has been transmitted correctly.
Error detection and correction algorithms are well known. These algorithms conventionally operate on a transmitting frame or packet of information and perform a calculation based on at least a portion of the transmitting frame or packet of information to produce error correction or detection data which is incorporated into the frame or packet during transmission for use by a receiving device to determine whether the frame contains errors (error detection) and correct any errors contained in the frame or packet (error correction). In one example of such a data communication scheme, CRC 107 is based solely on the data contained in header 103. When such a scheme is employed, a receiving device evaluates a received header 103 based upon CRC 107 to determine if the frame or packet is error free. However, since CRC 107 is separated from header 103 by data 105, the processing required to evaluate header 103 based upon CRC 107 is unnecessarily complicated.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to simplify the process of evaluating incoming frames based on a trailing error detection or correction portion, such as a CRC.